July 16, 2005 AD
The date above is 5 days off. There's a reason for that.
A note to those who would play the Infocom game Trinity: the ending is really depressing. You get the feeling that perhaps the world would have been better if you never found the white door that leads to the mushroom-filled surreal land called The Wabe....
Oh, and read the name on the crypt you break in to. If you recognize the name, it'll send a chill up your spine.
(Played the game and are confused? Slowly highlight the blank area between the lines below for the answer spelled out Invisiclue style.)
A) The boots you need to wear for the final act are from the corpse. You're wearing the dead person's boots in a land rife with time travel.
B) The silver coin you take from the body and give to the oarsman Charon for passage is labelled "nontransferrable". Yet Charon lets you use it. He's been doing this a long time, and probably doesn't make many mistakes.
C) The crypt reads "WABEWALKER"...
D) ... and when you find the Book of Hours, it reads "In which Wabewalker happens upon a Book of Hours, and begins to study it." Followed by a few commands you just typed.
E) The Book of Hours is chronicling YOUR LIFE. You're the Wabewalker!
F) The centuries-dead hero in the tomb is you. You're plundering your own corpse.
Another depressing element: Members of Usenet have pointed out that when the area beyond the first white door is revealed to you, you read this:
As your eyes sweep the landscape, you notice more of the giant toadstools. There must be hundreds of them. Some sprout in clusters, others grow in solitude among the trees. Their numbers increase dramatically as your gaze moves westward, until the forest is choked with pale domes.
More Invisiclues:
A) Toadstools are mushrooms, as in "mushroom cloud".
B) Notice that each toadstool gate leads to a place where a nuclear bomb is about to go off?
C) A day can be a literal sunrise-to-sunrise timespan. It can also be a metaphor for a longer time.
D) Thus, things appearing in the west would be later in the "day", and therefore later in time.
E) On the sundial, the Alpha gate (first letter of the Greek alphabet) is the easternmost (or earliest). It leads to Trinity Site, the first manmade nuclear explosion ever.
F) The Omega gate (last letter of the Greek alphabet) is the one you leave the Kensington Gardens explosion in.
G) It's also the westernmost.
H) Therefore, it's also part of the last manmade nuclear exchange. Ever.
I) Think about how the toadstools are arranged again. 'Some sprout in clusters, others grow in solitude among the trees. Their numbers increase dramatically as your gaze moves westward, until the forest is choked with pale domes.'
J) The forest is the scope of human history. Each toadstool represents one nuclear blast. The closer together, the closer in time. The further west, the later in time.
K) The west end of the forest is looking pretty bleak now, isn't it?
Go back! Back I say!
Go back further!
Run along home.
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